Hospitals can achieve high reliability

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Hospitals need to make substantial changes in order to achieve the goal of zero patient harm that will enable them be classed as high reliability organizations.

That is the view of Mark Chassin, CEO, and Dr Jerod Loeb, executive vice president for healthcare quality evaluation, at The Joint Commission, a non for profit body that certifies healthcare professionals, who recently published an article titled ‘High-Reliability Healthcare: Getting There from Here’”.

Chassin and Loeb report that too many hospitals and healthcare leaders currently view serious safety failures as routine and inevitable parts of daily work. To prevent the harm that results from these failures, which affects millions of Americans each year, the article specifies a framework for changes involving leadership, safety culture and robust process improvement.

This framework is designed to help hospitals make progress toward high reliability, which is the achievement of maintaining high levels of safety over long periods of time – safety comparable to that demonstrated by the commercial air travel, nuclear power, and amusement park industries.

The Joint Commission tested the high-reliability framework at seven US hospitals, as well as through face-to-face meetings and testing with healthcare leaders. In the article, Chassin and Loeb outline the 14 components of a high-reliability framework and contend that hospital